I got MM to compress my entire collection to MP3 in a parallel directory (actually on a portable HDD), using LAME. It took about a week, but I didn't have to do anything other than tell it where to put it.

Then I created a portable MM installation and library on that HDD, which I use only for syncing to a portable media player.

I can take the portable HDD, plug it in to any PC, and play my music. Admittedly, in less than CD quality...

I followed the (half german/ half english) instructions on the EAC website and extracted Lame into a given directory. Can anyone tell me how to 'link' that with MM?

Also I have started to rip a few CD's to FLAC using EAC. It seems to be excellent but I can't see where the set/change the FLAC compression?
Also following the instructions I am using Action - Test and Save - uncompressed to start the ripping process. This sees it take a bit over an hour per CD! Does that seem right! Is there a different option I should be using to make this quicker? I want FLAC, but maybe I am choosing the wrong options somewhere...

Thanks.

edit: OK so.. I did 4 CDs already BUT I was using 'uncompressed' ( I was confusing this with 'lossless'). I assume that is why I have ended up with WAV files? Is there a way to tell EAC to covert/compress these to FLAC format now?

Of course EAC can. It can also use LAME to compress to MP3 without any dubious 30-day 'trial period' for allowing use of free software (LAME). The fact that MM does this as an inducement to get people to buy MM is questionable practice, IMHO.

This 30-day limit can be overcome once the 30 days are up by dropping a new copy of lame-enc.dll into MM's install directory. There used to be an FAQ on this topic, but it seemed to be removed some years ago.

MP3 is a complicated licensing mess with multiple owners to the licenses. It's easy to include a unlimited version, but the legality of that can be questioned. Some developers may not worry about this or don't care.

To add to lowlanders reply above and give you example how things are complicated, ALAC was licensed few years back and we needed to pay to make it available to users now MMW free contain Free ALAC codec. Same is for MP3s We can't supply free encoder but MMW can support some free MP3 encoders manually installed by user.

> Perhaps you could clarify - how do you choose how compressed to make it? (I've heard of compression 1-8 available ?

There was some discussion on the ripping thread about the FLAC compression level. I use -8 to get maximum compression, but there is an argument that is a bit OTT. I don't find any processing problem with compression or decompression on any platform with my -8 compressed files.

For the mechanism of setting the compression option strings in EAC, I'd refer to the EAC documentation. Or this: